Digital libraries

Last updates:
Wed Aug 25 08:28:07 2004
...
Fri Apr 14 07:48:57 2006

The
April 1995,
April 1998,
and
May 2001
issues of the Communications of the ACM, and the
February 1999
issue of IEEE Computer, are special issues on digital
libraries. This document contains pointers to a number of
WWW sites mentioned there, plus several others not
mentioned. Geographical locations are provided as a
possible clue to connection speed. Most offer extensive
search capabilities.

The New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors
aims to ``catalog all deceased authors, and all authors of
books published before 1964, including their full name(s),
date of death, date of birth, pseudonyms, sex and
nationality (for non-EU citizens who died after c1920),
and their books published before 1964.''. It indexes more
than 24,000 books at
http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ngcoba/ngcoba.htm.

There is another archive, original devoted to DataBase
systems and Logic Programming (DBLP), but now being
expanded to other areas of computer science, changing the
meaning of DBLP to Digital Bibliography & Library
Project, at Universität Trier:
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/
The archive has about ten mirrors around the world for
faster access at your site, and offers search-by-author,
and lists of conferences and journals covered.

U.S. Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)
are available at
http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/
with indexes by category, keyword, and publication number.
Newer FIPS standards are freely available in full text
form via links from that site.

In most cases, ISO Standards are expensive copyrighted
documents, sold for profit, and not available in
machine-readable form. There are, however, some
exceptions in the list below. In rare cases, they
may be reproduced in textbooks (e.g., Herbert Schildt,
The annotated ANSI C standard: American National
Standard for Programming Languages C: ANSI/ISO
9899-1990, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1990, ISBN
0-07-881952-0, and Jeanne C. Adams et al., Fortran 95
Handbook: Complete ISO/ANSI Reference, MIT Press,
1997, ISBN 0-262-51096-0.) or in draft form in journals
(e.g., ACM SIGNUM and ACM Fortran Forum).

University of California
CD ROM information system [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory,
CA, USA]. This collection includes about 260,000 books,
with 1990 US Census data, outline maps of all US cities,
and US foreign trade statistics.

COPAC:
a new national Online Public Access Catalogue,
providing unified access to the online catalogues of
some of the largest university research libraries in
the UK and Ireland.
[Manchester, UK]

Deutsche Bibliothek
It tries to collect catalog entries every book
published in German. Follow the link to "Suche"
(search) for searching by subject, title, or URL.

Library of Congress
catalog
[Washington, DC, USA] [NB: This site far too often
refuses connections: try the alternate Z39.50
interfaces in the next item below]

Library of Congress
Z39.50 gateways to LC catalog
[Washington, DC, USA]
This points to more than 430 Z39.50 gateways to the
Library of Congress catalog around the world, and may
also be a starting point for finding other library
catalogs.

Digital Library of Mathematical Functions:
This is to be the electronic form of the famous
Abramowitz & Stegun's Handbook of Mathematical
Functions. (U.S. National Bureau of Standards
#55, 1964). At present (late 2002), only a chapter
outline and Web mockup are available.

Verzeichnis lieferbarer Buecher, VLB
[Germany]
Follow the link to Datenbanken to search the database,
and the link to Buchhandlungen und Verlage to reach
an extensive list of German bookstores and publishers.

There are now a few Web sites that offer sources of random
numbers that are generated by physical processes that may
be more random than numbers obtained by any of
the well-known methods for generating pseudorandom numbers
by computer algorithms.